Artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen has spent much of his career building immersive environments out of ecological research — digitally reconstructing an extinct bird’s habitat for RE-ANIMATED, reimagining Berlin’s wetland origins for Berl-Berl. His most recent major work, Psychosphere, goes a layer deeper: literally, underwater, to the origin of life itself.
What’s in the cave
Steensen shot deep-sea footage diving across a range stretching from the Azores to the Aeolian Islands, supplementing it with material from research vessels REV Ocean and REV Aurora. That footage played on screens inside Cisternerne, a former underground water reservoir in Copenhagen run by the Frederiksberg Museums, reflected in standing water across the cave floor — a setup Steensen describes as creating “a parallel world beneath.” The Cisternerne run closed November 30, 2025, and the work’s North American premiere, as part of the Otherworlds exhibition curated by Daniel Fiset at PHI in Montréal, closed September 13, 2026. Both showings have now ended; this piece covers the work itself rather than an ongoing exhibition.
Three sculptural series sit alongside the projected footage:
- Abiogenesis, a freestanding centerpiece named for the theory that life emerged from non-organic matter under the pressure and heat of deep-sea volcanoes billions of years ago
- Orogeny, interactive glass sculptures inspired by the geology of former sea-basin deserts
- Amorphous, resin and fiberglass forms modeled on sketches and extinct sea lily specimens
The idea underneath the installation
The work draws its title and conceptual spine from writer Melanie Challenger’s idea of the “psychosphere” — the proposal that every living being is a self with its own meaning, rather than existing only within a human-centered view of nature. Steensen has been explicit that the work is responding to a live concern, not an abstract one: as deep-sea mining draws growing commercial interest, Psychosphere asks what it means to protect species and ecosystems once they’re reframed as resources to extract rather than agents with standing of their own.
The piece was commissioned by Cisternerne with research support from the Gaia Art Foundation, and was later adapted into an immersive LED tunnel shown at the 2025 United Nations Ocean Conference in partnership with ArtExplora — taking the installation from a gallery context directly into a policy one.
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